Shanghai 1937 : Stalingrad on the Yangtze

351 Pages·2013·26.128 MB·English

by  Peter Harmsen

Shanghai
1937
Stalingrad on the Yangtze
by PETER HARMSEN
CASEMATE
Philadelphia & Oxford
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2013 by
CASEMATE PUBLISHERS
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Harmsen
ISBN 978-1-61200-167-8
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-168-5
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ESS FSC* C011935
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7
PROLOGUE 9
CHAPTER I THREE CORPSES 13
CHAPTER 2 “BLACK SATURDAY” 45
CHAPTER 3 FLESH AGAINST STEEL 69
CHAPTER 4 “BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!” 93
CHAPTER 5 RIVERS OF BLOOD 129
CHAPTER 6 VERDUN OF THE EAST 157
CHAPTER 7 THE “LOST BATTALION” 187
CHAPTER 8 COLLAPSE 219
CHAPTER 9 AFTERMATH 245
ORDER OF BATTLE 2.55
NOTES 263
BIBLIOGRAPHY 293
INDEX 303
Acknowledgments
No ENDEAVOR IS A ONE-MAN UNDERTAKING. THIS ALSO GOES FOR
Shanghai 1937. The information needed to tell the untold story of the great
battle on the banks of the Yangtze had to come from numerous sources,
some less obvious than others. I have depended on the help of acquain­
tances, and the occasional kindness of strangers, without whom this book
would never have made it into print.
I wish to acknowledge the following institutions for their generous
assistance: Academia Historica, Taipei; the National Central Library, Tai­
pei; the Department Military Archives, Freiburg im Breisgau; and Colum­
bia Center for Oral History. The willingness of the Asahi Shimbun Photo
Archives and of the American Geographical Society Library, University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, to share their rich and unique holdings
of historical images was essential in putting together a pictorial record of
the momentous events described in this book.
Among individuals who have contributed, I would particularly like to
mention Kashiwagi Kazuhiko, editor at Asahi Shimbun Photo Archives,
and Fang Jun, a Beijing-based amateur historian who shows by his own
personal example that the memory of the Sino-Japanese War is very much
alive in China today. Thanks should also go to my colleague Sam Yeh in
the Taipei office of the French news agency AFP for his help in giving this
book an Internet presence.
I am extremely grateful for the help provided by the staff at Casemate
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SHANGHAI 1937
Publishers, including editorial director Steven Smith, for his enthusiastic
support during the entire process of preparing this publication; designer
Libby Braden for ensuring that the book ended up as visually appealing as
it did; and editor Anita Baker for polishing the manuscript with a keen
eye for both the big picture and the small, but important, detail.
The patience of my wife Hui-tsung was crucial. Finally, thanks to my
children, Eva and Lisa, for putting up with all the evenings and weekends
Dad had to spend in front of the computer.
Taipei, February 2013
Prologue
In the early part of 1937, THE concept of urban warfare was
still new to the world. Three months of battle in Shanghai in the fall of
that year changed all that. The struggle between China and Japan demon­
strated what happens to a major city when it becomes the arena for two
vast armies, fielding hundreds of thousands of men and an array of destruc­
tive weapons. There had been other instances of war in an urban setting—
indeed, earlier in the decade Shanghai was an example of that—but never
on such a massive scale. The scenes of flattened housing complexes and
gutted factories that were later to captivate and horrify the global public
during the batde of Stalingrad had in fact already been played out more
than five years earlier in Chinas largest city.
In a sense, the struggle for Shanghai in 1937 was a dress rehearsal for
World War II, Or more correctly, perhaps, it was part of World War II.
Arguably, it could be considered to be the first major battle in a conflict
that divided mankind into two major camps—one consisting of Fascist re­
gimes in various guises, the other a motley group of democratic and total­
itarian nations. To westerners it is natural to see World War II as starting
in earnest with Hitlers invasion of Poland in 1939. For Asians, it is just as
logical to think of it as beginning two years earlier on the north Chinese
plain and along the banks of the Yangtze.
Even if the battle of Shanghai is considered isolated from the larger
context of World War II, it was undeniably an event that would leave an
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10 • SHANGHAI 1937
indelible mark on the two ancient civilizations caught up in it. It was the
biggest clash between nations that East Asia had seen since the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904 and 190 5.1 It turned localized, and possibly manage­
able, Sino-Japanese friction into a full-scale war that would continue for
eight bloody years. In fact neither side, Chinese or Japanese, has ever really
found closure, and to this day, nearly 80 years later, they remain locked in
mutual suspicion. Much of this is due to the appalling brutality exhibited
by the Japanese Army in China, which was epitomized in the infamous
Rape of Nanjing—a direct result of the Shanghai campaign.
Shanghai was Asia’s most cosmopolitan city and home to citizens from
a range of nations, as well as a large number of stateless people. Although
they lived in areas left mostly untouched by combat, they were often just
yards away from scenes of carnage where men and women fought and died
in their thousands. These foreign inhabitants became the unwilling wit­
nesses of the battle that raged all around them, and in that way they helped
write history themselves. Rarely before had so many civilians seen so much
bloodshed at such close range. The analogy would have been if a district
of Stalingrad had miraculously been left unharmed by the battle, allowing
the residents to take in all of the fighting that devoured the rest of the city.
Or, in the words of American correspondent Edgar Snow: “It was as though
Verdun had happened on the Seine, in full view of a Right Bank Paris that
was neutral; as though a Gettysburg were fought in Harlem, while the rest
of Manhattan remained a non-belligerent observer.”2
Verdun and Gettysburg are apt comparisons. These battles had been
momentous events, and the battle that consumed the Yangtze River delta
in the latter half of 1937 was, too. The rest of the world understood this
and the fighting regularly occupied the front pages of major newspapers
around the globe. Shanghai seized the imagination then for much the same
reasons as it does so again today. It was a place of excitement and exotic
adventure, and the public wanted to be informed when its fete was hanging
in the balance.
Therefore, it is ironic that so little has been written in any language
other than Chinese about the battle of Shanghai in past decades. Not a
single monograph on this crucial encounter is listed among the hundreds
of thousands of volumes dealing with World War II and its antecedents.
In a time when academic and popular writers must use all their imaginative
PROLOGUE II
powers to think up uncovered angles on the war in Europe and the Pacific,
the battle of Shanghai and many other battles of the 1937—194s Sino-
Japanese War constitute a gaping hole in the historiography. It is my hope
that this book can make a modest contribution towards rectifying this
imbalance.
In what follows, almost all Chinese names are spelled using the pinyin
system of transliteration introduced in China after 1949 and now increas­
ingly adopted elsewhere. Traditional spelling has only been kept in a few
instances where the use of pinyin would confuse rather than enlighten.
China’s supreme leader is referred to as Chiang Kai-shek rather than Jiang
Jieshi. In addition, in bibliographical references, authors’ spellings of their
own names are maintained, even if they do not follow the conventions for
the use of pinyin, for example, Hsin Ta-mo instead of Xin Damo.
Geographical names are generally given in their modern rendering
rather than the way they were described in 1937, e.g. Beijing instead of
Beiping and Taiwan instead of Formosa. Here, too, exceptions have been
allowed for the sake of clarity. Manchukuo is not spelled Manzhouguo,
and Marco Polo Bridge is not called Lugou Bridge.
It is generally the custom to give the full names of Chinese persons in
the first reference, and later refer to them by their family names only. I
have frequendy departed from this convention so that it is possible to make
the necessary distinctions between people with the same family names, e.g.
Zhang Zhizhong and Zhang Fakui, who were both pivotal commanders.
My aim is also to make it easier for the reader to commit the often unfa­
miliar names to memory. For Japanese persons, family names are put before
given names.
KONC3
20OMJUES
CHAPTER
1
Three Corpses
July 7-A ugust 12
The bullet-riddled sedan had screeched to an abrupt halt
at the entrance of the airfield. Nearby, the two men who had been inside
lay sprawled on the ground. Their blood-soaked uniforms identified them
as members of the Japanese Navy’s elite Special Landing Force. The brains
splashed across the dashboard showed that one of them had died inside
the car. He had then been dragged out to be slashed, kicked and pounded
into a pulp. Half his face was missing and his stomach had been cut open,
the sickly pallor of his intestines gleaming faindy in the night. The other
man had escaped the vehicle but had only managed a few paces before be­
ing gunned down. A litde distance away lay a third body, dressed in a Chi­
nese uniform.1
It was several hours before dawn on Tuesday, August io, 1937. Dark­
ness still engulfed Hongqiao Aerodrome eight miles west of Shanghai, and
the investigators had to work under automobile headlights and using elec­
tric torches. They were a diverse group. There were Chinese, of course, but
there were also Japanese, British, French and American detectives—repre­
sentatives of foreign powers that felt quite at home in Chinas largest and
most prosperous city after nearly a century there. Also present was a group
of reporters from the cutthroat world of Shanghai’s English- and Chinese-
language press. Despite the antisocial hour, they had to be here. This could
be big, very big.
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